When I was offered a course on Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature at Lehman College for the fall semester, I was super-excited to get started on my syllabus. There’s so much I can do in a course like that! And then as I started putting it together, I got more and more frustrated with it: there’s so much I can do in a course like that…. How will I ever figure out which books to use and what issues to focus on?
It took quite a while, but I’m pleased with the final results. Just for fun (and because I kept exclaiming on social media as “things are falling into place!” and as they fell… out of place), I’m sharing a few drafts of the syllabus in various stages, including versions where I was going to require that my students read chapters from a textbook in addition to one children’s book each week (what on earth was I thinking??)
What I’m not showing here: the many lists and configurations of books and assignments. What you see here, in the images below, is just a sample of how I played around with the structure of the semester. (Links to screen-readable PDFs above each set of images.)
child lit schedule draft NOT USING
Note: The purpose of this draft, and the next, was to figure out the trajectory of the semester. I was never going to assign this much reading!!
child lit schedule draft NOT USING 2
Bernstein_English 335_Fall 2018_syllabus
Dainy Bernstein 